Reflections on Life & Death After My Father’s Passing

This is a piece I penned a year after my father passed. Now approaching three years, I revisit it each year at the anniversary of his passing.

When there is a loss in a family, there is an expectation for the eldest child to step up to the plate. To assume the mantel. And it is through stoicism that we eldest children communicate to others that we understand and accept the role. This is not isolated to me nor my culture. It’s a universally human trait, across all cultures. And as such, in many ways, as the eldest survivors, we carry the burden by internalizing our pain. It’s our show of strength and resolve.

Rabbi Wolpe and I spoke a couple of weeks after Dad’s passing and he said something that stuck with me: With parents, we take for granted how readily available they always are to us. Truly, they are the only people, who go out of their way to be as available as possible for us. It’s a uniquely parent thing to do. We may have not called them for weeks, or inversely seven times in a day, but they will, without fail, make themselves available to their children. Rain, shine, day, night, pain, inconvenient or not. Now, abruptly, someone, who I always knew that whenever and as irregularly I would want him to be available at the behest of my whim, suddenly is now completely the opposite — utterly unavailable to me. There is no starker contrast.

And, like so many others before me, internalize it I did. Yet a week did not go by that first year — not a single week — that at some point I didn’t cry. Sometimes unexpectedly. I remember coming home one night in the best of moods, had an amazing day at work, I came home, sat at the kitchen and saw the seat my dad would sit in and the tears started rolling. Or I’ll hear a new song like Little Giant by Roo Panes with words that just fit — and I’d aimlessly drive in circles playing the song on repeat — savoring the moment and the emotions.

And Why? An Interesting discussion about death recently by Taylor Sheridan really shed light on this. Sheridan relates that it is not until we suffer the death of a loved one that we allow ourselves to grieve. And he follows, that it is during suffering that we begin to visit them in our minds, and in so begin remembering the joy he gave me — all the love that he knew. By shying from the pain of it, by being stoic, I would be robbing myself of every memory of him. All of them. It has been in accepting and embracing the pain that I have found the very best way to keep him with me.

Which as a Kamrava, is interesting. The broader Kamrava family mantra is in so many ways based on cognition; on rationality. We’re a cerebral family. Cognition trumps emotions, as emotions are just one of our senses that help us navigate the world. A rational and wise mind can understand its emotions, bringing the sub-consciousness to the surface and in doing so master and in turn control it. But what I’ve come to realize is, that for our memories — a tremendous portion of our memories are deeply seeded within our sub-consciousness — they are beyond cognition.

Consider — if a memory had been formed before one has “mastered” cognition, well then that memory is exactly that — it is purely emotion based. And since our deepest most amazing memories of life-long loved ones are seeded and developed from infancy, the vast majority of our very best core memories of them are purely emotional memories. And so, while stories, photos, and videos give us our concrete memories, our emotions are what give us our living memories. I felt my dad before I ever understood him. I got excited to see him come home from work before I understood that excitement. Separation anxiety preceded the intellectual friendship that he and I cultivated later in life.

Really, what is a memory without the associated feeling of it? Why remember if it doesn’t make you smile, laugh or cry? And in experiencing death, the crying doesn’t have to mean suffering. No. Indeed, I cry and smile simultaneously when remembering him — but it is in the crying that I remember him most vividly.

So part of me doesn’t ever want to let go of my tears because it is with the tears that I truly feel his presence. And so it will likely continue for as long as I can maintain it, tears I shed, seemingly in private, but in reality — they are my moments fully in his presence — the most vivid incarnation I can provide of him for myself.

I’d like to finish with a comment — We’re taught as scientists that there is no other world beyond this world — spirituality is just faith in non-sense. Religion has been “disproven.” Through life, I’ve come in many ways to think otherwise. There are many reasons but simply for discussion here I will tie to one — in 1984 physicists Michael Green and John Schwartz postulated a theory that has been widely accepted in the field including the likes of Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawkings. The theory is that there are 6 dimensions beyond the 3 that humans are able to grasp and they reside in what they call the “bulk” of space, or the “out-back” dimension. Us humans are confined to the “brane” of space. They call this the superstring theory.

Six dimensions beyond ours. Humans lack the capacity to grasp them. We know they exist, but we don’t know what’s within them (other than time). Consider the implications. Is this the bridge between science and spirituality? In 2015, Scientists in Europe tapped the bulk that Green & Schwartz theorized about 31 years earlier for a fraction of a second for the first time. This begets the question — can this be where he is? Is this the next step in the sequence?

I don’t know, and accept that until the time comes, I will not know. But what I do know is that he is with me — be it my sub-conscious constantly advising me as he would have done and my knowledge that the elders of both the religious and the scientific communities know beyond a reasonable doubt that there is a much larger and more complex dimension beyond our own.

And so when our daughter, Liana, asks almost on a regular basis, if she will get to see Baba Doctor again one day, it is with a very straight face that I say, “yes.” Because despite the prevailing cultural wisdom of our time, I see a future wherein we are united as a distinct and rational possibility … and until that time, I will continue to feel his memory.

Sid “Baba Doctor” Kamrava and his Grandkids a few weeks before his passing (Liana in pink, center).